While computers have been entering the United States’
marketplace for more than a third of a century, our levels of
productivity-improvement remained largely stagnant until the past five years.
Information technology (IT) has finally become so powerful and cheap that
cashless commerce, ticketless travel, paperless processes, and campusless
colleges are rapidly becoming practical working realities. At the same time, our
experience-based understanding of how to use IT effectively is leading to the
widespread re-invention of both public and private enterprise. In this
presentation, futurist David Pearce Snyder will describe the newly emerging
model of horizontal, virtually-integrated enterprise that has already begun to
replace the classic hierarchical, vertically-integrated model of industrial
enterprise in both the private and public sectors, creating
"distributed" organizations in which a growing percentage of all
workers – from the rank-and-file to the executive suite – will be provided
with decision-critical information, and enabled to act upon it.